ABOUT NEUROLIVE

NEUROLIVE IS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH COLLABORATION THAT BRINGS ARTISTS, SCIENTISTS AND AUDIENCES TOGETHER TO STUDY WHAT MAKES LIVE EXPERIENCES SPECIAL.

Liveness is vital to dance, theatre and music performances – and to many other kinds of events, including political rallies, sports events, and university lectures – but what exactly sets live experiences apart from recorded, streamed or simulated ones?

NEUROLIVE is an interdisciplinary research collaboration, supported by a two-million-euro grant from the European Research Council between 2020 and 2025. Over the five years of the project, NEUROLIVE commissioned and staged four fully-produced dance performances that were both artistic and neuroscientific investigations of liveness, each time focussing on distinct artistic perspectives and addressing different aspects of making and experiencing live dance. Alongside the four live performances, the project’s research programme is completed by five workshops, a series of follow-up lab-based experiments, and two liveness symposia.

NEUROLIVE’s approach to investigating and interrelating different ways of practicing, conceptualising and measuring liveness is intrinsically interdisciplinary. It combines practices of artistic research and performance making, theories from dance, theatre and performance studies, cognitive neuroscience, experimental design and mobile neuroimaging. Throughout the project, artists and scientists have worked collaboratively while at the same time working to maintain the full distinctness of their artistic and scientific practices. Artistic research helped to shape the experimental design of psychological studies in the lab, while scientific principles and methods fed into the making of dance and choreography in the studio.

Our research highlights how multilayered and sophisticated performers’ and audiences’ practices of liveness can be, and shows that aspects of the experience of liveness are quantifiable as behavioural, psychophysiological and neural entanglement between performers’ and spectators’ minds, brains and bodies.

The NEUROLIVE programme of artistic and scientific research activities are documented on the Performances, Workshops and Events pages on this site. New publications from this research are forthcoming and will continue to be added to the Publications page.

Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has been part of NEUROLIVE - as audience members, research participants, collaborating artists and scientists, our fantastic partner organisations and funders, and the wonderful NEUROLIVE team ♥️

Contact:
Dr Guido Orgs
guido.orgs@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Matthias Sperling matthias.sperling@ucl.ac.uk

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This research project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 864420 - Neurolive)

Website design: Victoria Ford